Stitching and Other Poems

Laurie Mazzaferro

Stitching   I’ll state the obvious: seagulls stitch a lullaby I confess, I stole the line from a student sestina. There is something about the possibility of sky, a hand suturing an eye & sin (abstract, don’t bother to define) condenses inside a bell jar.   Let me start again: I once loved a man who gathered stone. I watched him hack drift wood, we knelt & waited for fire. It was fall, in the Laurel Mountains. We rode his V-Rod. Nothing but the smell of decay & our creaking knees. He packed a picnic supper -- strawberries, cheese. Nobody had ever done anything like that for me.   We made love that evening against a tree. It started to rain. We found a discarded bottle & I collected drops of mud bits of twigs, crumbled leaves the outer shells of locusts.   Let’s be  totally honest: When do the echoes of seagulls ever linger in the mountains but sometimes a stray bird swoops & stitches a lullaby & sound collects inside a button jar.   Each day we recover bits of ourselves & slip them through a button hole we stretch fabric taut                                         & let it sway behind us.   I made the class write a sestina. It was winter. They hated me anyway. It was one of those semesters when there isn’t enough vodka. (Although I gave up drinking 1 year, 2 months ago, but who’s counting?)   One student lost her husband to cancer. Another a husband to the Iraq war. Each morning she caught the 31C, left her two babies with a neighbor & sat in the circle & wept & nobody in the room knew any of this except me not her classmates who bitched about grades, the papers, the poems I made them read not the girl who wrote about watching her mother get raped (I know what they say about poetry & biography) not the girl who sat in class & recorded everything I said as some type of evidence against my teaching (everything you say can & will be used against you) not even the young man who came to class drunk his father died that semester.   It’s this simple: The man I love is married. I am forty-two & up until that moment in the woods I never felt rain or let a man peel back my sternum with his thumbnail. When I woke I was covered in mud   & by the time seagulls & lighthouses filled the world’s aquarium & students fidgeted in their seats  I gathered my sins  (of which apparently there are many) inside the button jar & that damn student’s seagull pecked at my eyelids demanding I see something.   I love a man who rides a motorcycle he is the only man I love. The morning I read seagulls stitch a lullaby I let him drive out of the bell jar. This is all I have to say.

Shadow   Looking out the kitchen window Eve knows she has passed through a membrane   the moment the snake sends her an email where he says he wants to stay inside   her forever until she begs him to stop & she knows he is serious   the way that women know the difference between a baby’s cry   for hunger or please pick me up & when she says, yes, darling, let’s do it   the snake replies with a letter about the harvest, his two daughters, their hair   floating in air, how their bodies arch on horseback, how he canned apple butter   with his wife, and Eve watches his shadow disappear, the way shadows curl under   autumn light & she studies her shadow in the distance   she watches it hesitate   then pause & look back to face the reflection looking out her kitchen window.

Lullaby   one day I will rise   at first a flutter, then a foot caught on the edge   of your rib.  It will happen suddenly the day you fish through garbage   & search for your child’s artwork the scribbles on construction paper she crumbled   in her fist because it wasn’t good enough & for whatever reason   you find yourself in the garage bare-feet slapping concrete at 2 in the morning   because pincher-gripping smeared newspaper is better than sleep. As you sift through coffee grinds, egg shell & empty beer cans   you stumble on a bit of dried leaf   or so it seems. You sit at the kitchen table   with only the sound of a florescent bulb to calm you & smooth out orange & brown crayon markings   suddenly you understand death how the human hand must shed itself free from the body   that’s when you know the leaf you found at the bottom of the trash                    nestled between toothpaste & strands of hair is really a decomposed hand                                           that slipped off like a glove to fold itself inside your palm

 

Among others, Laurie Mazzaferro's publication credits include Barrow Street, Poet Lore, West Branch, Pearl, 5 AM, New Delta Review, Unlikely Stories and Poems Niederngasse. She is recipient of two pushcart nominations and the winner of the 2000 Slipstream chapbook contest. Presently, she teaches creative writing, worries about her son, a talented visual artist, who attends Kent State, and rides a motor cycle. Hey, life's too short.
 

Photo Courtesy of Image*After.

 

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Poems Copyright © 2006 Laurie Mazzaferro. All rights reserved.